The work I do with my team is centered around people. You can call it Human-Centered Design, Design Thinking, or any of the other popular terms. In this article, I’ll detail an exercise we use at the start of many of our engagements known as "A Day in the Life." The goal of a Day in the Life exercise is to understand how a customer perceives how they use their time during the day. This task is valuable as you can use the data to create Personas and Customer Journey Maps.
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The Day in the Life activity brings a visual approach to analyzing the actions of an individual or a group. The activity can help substantially improve their effectiveness, efficiency, and enable optimal management of critical events in the workday of individuals in an organization. There are three essential stages of the activity:
The outcome of completing a Day in the Life chart is a high-level view of a customer’s typical day. Note, the Day in the Life activity can be extended to run for a week or a month. Templates for Day in the Life, Week in the Life, and Month in the Life are included at the end of this article.
A Day in the Life activity will help you answer the following questions:
Going into a "Day in the Life" activity, it’s essential for you and your team to be clear on the questions you’re looking to have answered. In other words, a little pre-work goes a long way.
We use the following checklist when framing the Day in the Life assignment:
You will see that many of the questions are open-ended in the checklist as you go into each assignment As we want to think intentionally about the interviewee, open items force us to pause and calibrate the interview to the person we’re meeting.
The most common method for conducting an interview is a 1-on-1 with the customer. When you meet with the interviewee, you’ll want to be clear about the purpose of the meeting. It’s useful to review the following:
The interviewee can complete the template, or you can ask questions and record their answers. My personal preference is to ask questions. It’s essential to thank them for their time after completing the interview and, if your budget can accommodate, give a "thank you" gift such as a gift card to a coffee shop.
The following are three templates you can use for:
You will need to determine which template to use for each engagement.
The focus of the feedback is to highlight the activities in the Day of the Life with an eye on the business problem being solved. Tools that complement a Day in the Life include Persona and Customer Journey Map.
I’ve found that the raw data by itself doesn’t tell a complete story. It’s worthwhile to have someone convert the data into a single, one-page infographic that illustrates the work and highlights key data points. Below are examples of infographics you can use. I’ve found that “gig” sites such as Fivrr.com are great places to find brilliant, low-cost talent to build infographics.
Source: catchyagency
Source: 3back
Source: ragan
Like all things, running “Day in the Life” exercises take practice. Keep doing them and you will find that the value will increase in the content you generate. As mentioned above, the “Day in the Life” exercise complements Persona and Customer Journey Map development.
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Matt is a Digital Leader at Accenture. His passion is a combination of solving today's problems to run more efficiently, adjusting focus to take advantage of digital tools to improve tomorrow and move organizations to new ways of working that impact the future.
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